I’ve been fighting for the last 3 days with a very strange problem. Since some time after I’ve initiated 23 plugin updates of my WordPress based weblog pc-freak.net I’ve ended up with My Feedburner Subscribers button showing 0 Subscribers.

You can imagine how bad impression such a button makes to regular readers of a 0 blog readers. Before I ended up with this button it was showing 365 reades. Such a button those who subscribed for a blog feed could mean only one thing that the blog is useless and the flock effect of people unsubscribing is about to become shortly reality. Hence to prevent a bad SEO Impact from this button I had to urgently fix that !

First thing which I did is to to login using my Google Account with which I’ve set-up the feed earlier and check whether I have really 0 subscriptions or it is just a bug from the image button.

To see how many subscribers you have once you have logged into FeedBurner you have to go to:

PUBLICIZE -> FEEDCOUNT

I’ve spend many hours googling on the Feedburner issues just to found out such an errors is not news and even to understand FeedBurner used to be a separate company from Google before Google purchased it. So the problems this service is facing is an ancestry from the previous company.

From everything I red I understood the reason behind listeners in Google Feedburner to be 0 is often Google’s backend system, however I was not sure whether the problem I end up with is not caused by new enabled plugins I was suspecting the 0 subscriptions feed error might be caused by WP Author, Date and Meta Remover plugin – which is a cool plugin that wipes out all the annoying Author and Meta info that is set by plugin authors and just takes up space of the HTML / CSS / Javascript code

Other thing I tried is to not use code generated from Google Feedburner’s interface but instead use Feedburner stats wordpress plugin which is basicly doing the same thing but this doesn’t help either. That problem was really driving me crazy as it eat up at least one day from my life so finally after reading tons of posts online, I’ve learned that Enabled website caching also influences on how FeedBurner Counter button is displayed, thus I tried cleaning up W3 Total Cache’s Cache, Restarting the Apache server to make sure no caching is done on Apache level but guess what this didn’t solve it …

Finally after too much investigations and attempts to generate manually counter values with a PHP script I started trying to change values from the code form received from Google FeedBurner’s site (note to make here is this FeedCounter html code is on my WordPress Site Widgets – Appearance -> Widgets), e.g. the code issuing the 0 listeners picture was like this:

I started manually changing values, in the code trying to remove the ~fc from above string but this didn’t help.
Finally after some deletes from the code and continuous refresh in Google Chrome browser it worked out!!!!!!!!

To make it work I’ve changed listeners value to be equal to 335.p><a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/WalkingInLightWithChrist-FaithComputingDiary”><img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/WalkingInLightWithChrist-FaithComputingDiary?bg=99CCFF&amp;fg=444444&amp;anim=0&amp;label=listeners=335″ height=”26″ width=”88″ style=”border:0″ alt=”” /></a></p>

I’ve realied after that it doesn’t really matter whether I put listeners=335 or listeners=335000 because in reality webserver is diong some kind of ModRewrite rule rewriting the passed address to closest existing one.

I realized the fix was because trying to issue another URL i was getting the image resource not from a cache as I used to get it for 2 days but from unacached google location and this is the funny fix that took about 12 hours of debugging …

I hope this article will help someone else to save 12 hours of his life in useless website feedburned stats button debugging and spend it for reading something meaningful as the Holy Bible.

Get your Google+ URL is very easy however the description given by Google’s answers site on how to get google plus URL is obscure and very user unfriendly (in my opinion).
If you’re wondering why on earth would you ever need this URL, some useful place where you might need it is whether you’re a blogger like me and you need to link your blogspot or custom wordpress account with your google+ or you want it to link any other social network like Linkedin or Facebook to your Goo+ …

Below is a 3 steps guide to follow to get your Google+ account URL. The URL is not user friendly so you might also want to create a custom URL like:plus.google.com/your_custom_link